Marriott International’s Group Pricing Optimizer (GPO), a decision support system, provides guidance to Marriott personnel on pricing hotel rooms for group customers. GPO uses demand segmentation, price-elasticity modeling, and optimization techniques to recommend an optimal rate. In operation since late 2006, the system has improved Marriott’s hotel profitability and enhanced the sales process...

We apply Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) to image sequences generated from natural images using a range of spatial transformations. An analysis of the resulting receptive fields shows that they have a rich spectrum of invariances and share many properties with complex and hypercomplex cells of the primary visual cortex. Furthermore, the dependence of the solutions on the statistics of the transform...

This paper evaluates a more integrated approach of regulation when doing international comparisons and represents the first cross-country study in the South American region in which quality and weather variables have been included in the analysis. A total of 82 electricity distribution firms operating in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru have been analysed for the period 1998-2008. Stochastic f...

 In this research UF cheese pricing is considered and Pegah, Pak, Kaleh, Rouzaneh and Mihan firms’ data, as five main UF cheese competitive firms of Iran in breakfast cheese competitive market, is used. By using these firm’s sales data, production data and price of each ton of UF cheese in nineteen work-periods (each work-period is 6 months), their sales equations are estimated for each work-pe...

Monitoring sales of medications is a potential candidate for an early signal of a seasonal influenza epidemic. To test this theory, the data from a traditional, consultation-oriented influenza surveillance system were compared to medication sales and a predictive model was developed. Weekly influenza-like incidence rates from the National Influenza Sentinel Surveillance System were compared to ...

Usually housing is viewed in the context of consumption resulting from other economic drivers such as income and employment. Here, we study how two key local economic measures, the gross metropolitan product (GMP) and unemployment rate, respond to shocks in home value appreciation, home sales, and new construction, respectively. Our analysis relies upon a large panel of 158 metropolitan statist...

This study investigated two major types of metadiscourse markers as used in typical sales contracts, written by English natives and Iranian non-natives. In so doing, 60 sales contracts were selected, 30 written by native English and 30 by Iranian non-natives. Based on Hyland and Tse’s taxonomy, the contracts were codified and classified in terms of the frequency and percentage of the interactiv...